iphoting's Sink

“¹⁹He shall deliver you in six troubles, yes, in seven, no evil shall touch you. ²⁰In famine He shall redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. ²¹You shall be hidden from the scourge of the tongue, and you shall not be afraid of the destruction when it comes. ²²You shall laugh at destruction and famine, And you shall not be afraid of the beasts of the earth.” (Job 5:19-22).

In famine and destruction, you shall laugh. Isn’t that great?

I’ll be back in Hong Kong on the 1st December, 2008. Let me know if you want anything. But please, keep it simple to buy and not too expensive that I’ll go broke.

Generally, food and packaged products are easy, clothes slightly harder, and loose electronics the hardest to buy.

Started some days back, the flood of co-ordinated, distributed but slow brute-force attempts on my sshd (and possibly others) was evident in my logs. Over a few days, my logs swelled into megabytes, many times over the usual kilobytes.

The attack, I have to say, was rather intelligent. The attacker(s) used many machines, each trying a name starting from a, in concerted succession, alternating one after another. This way, my usual brute-force detection systems fail to kick in as they are seen to be a few invalid logins from each host, when view in a per-host isolated context.

In clearer terms, let’s say there are 1 to 1+n hosts. Host 1 tries to login as a. Fails, wait 1 second. Host 2 tries as b. Fails, waits x seconds, where x < 10 seconds. Host 3 tries as c. Rinse and repeat until the whole dictionary is visited. Innocent as each individual login might seem, when view from the context of an attacker, it’s simply brilliant.

Believe it or not, eventually, it’ll enter my machine if my defences aren’t stepped up to at least trigger a reaction to these events.

Days before, I’ve already implemented login tallies, whereby whenever an user account has experience 3 consecutive failed logins, the user account is locked, regardless of the password supplied. This way, I get to control when the accounts are re-enabled, allowing me to keep a closer eye on the situation.

Coincidentally, while the attacks are going on, one of my friends told me about his account which is always being locked out. As I was away from home, except to sleep, for the large part of that week, I hardly had the time to investigate.

Two days ago, in a bid to improve security, I came across this great defence mechanism, Fail2Ban. It works for multiple services and can flexibly do anything whenever too many failed connections are detected.

I rushed down to Funan after work, hoping that I could get my hands on the Company of Heroes Gold Edition which also comes with the Opposing Fronts standalone expansion pack.

I visited numerous shops but all of them claim that the product is sold out. Then, I came across ‘GameSpot’ and looked inside. To my horror and surprise, they have the product on stock, but only at S$19.90. I clarified with the staff as it looked like a misprint – too affordable to be true, compared to the standard retail price of S$59.90. The price was right, and I bought it.

At S$19.90, it’s a good opportunity to pay for a 2006 Game of the Year and play it online; it’s one of the best, if not the best Real-time strategy games I’ve ever seen.

I’m back from the Shoalwater Bay Training Area and it’s been an experience to fathom, thanks to the company of great companions. The environment is rather harsh and it’s something that Singaporeans can get to experience out of their usual living conditions.

The nights are chilly and the days are hot; winds stir up huge clouds of dust; dust trails from vehicles colour everything around brown.

That aside, I’ve also gathered sufficient evidence on why flight is better than fight in a conflict involving Singapore.

With that, here’s one of my favourite songs, Today is the Day by Lincoln Brewster:-